5 Times: What Would Surak Say?    Romulus
by StarTrekFanWriter
Summary: From 5 Times Verse: Spock cheats on Nyota on numerous occasions.  A nasty virus TH319 gives him away - and puts Nyota in the hospital where she is snapped up by Starfleet Intelligence for an assignment on Romulus.  bad!Spock & Nyota.


**Disclaimer: I don't own. I don't profit.**

**Summary: **

For those unfamiliar with 5 Times, Spock cheated on Nyota, on numerous occasions. A nasty virus TH319 gives him away - and puts Nyota in the hospital. Where she is snapped up by Starfleet Intelligence for an assignment on Romulus.

Spock / Uhura's Juicy Confrontation is the middle section. Enjoy!

**What Would Surak Say? / Romulus - a piece of the 5 Times Verse**

The small sanitary cubicle in the Romulan flat is cramped. Two bodies, Nyota's and T'Elle's, the sonic shower, stacks of communications and crytographic equipment, and holographic devices that in another universe won't be invented for another hundred years fill the small space. Behind the sonic shower walls are stashes of weapons, too. They must go about their work in here because not only does the room not have a window, the presence of the sonic shower's electrical fields hide the fields generated by their gear.

The only sound is the sound the sonic streams and Nyota's and T'Elle's breathing. Pressing her hearing piece closer to her ear, Nyota looks at T'Elle bent over a communications array, pressing her ear piece tight to her head just as Nyota is doing.

T'Elle comes from the equatorial region of Vulcan. Like Nyota she is a more deeply pigmented member of her race. She and Nyota are nearly the same skin tone now that Nyota takes pills that give her dermis a slightly green cast. Although T'Elle appears only a little older than Nyota's real age, she is actually closer to 60. Nyota herself looks closer to 120 in Romulan years, wrinkled and gray. It's a ruse to cover up her relative fragility.

T'Elle looks up. Like Nyota she has been surgically altered to have prominent brow ridges. Her eyes are black and expressionless beneath her sharply cut bangs.

"Nothing," says T'Elle. "They said the operation would be complete by now."

Swallowing, Nyota nodds. They don't know what the operation is, but they've been told to be prepared. For nearly four years the Federation has been at war with the Romulans. For two years Nyota and T'Elle have been operating a safe house on Romulus. The Federation has been sending in agents - male and female, Vulcan and human, all surgically altered to look identical to one another - and

Romulan, of course. Nyota's not really sure how many different agents have come through and lodged with them; but as far as the neighbors are concerned, she lives with her daughter and has had two sons and another daughter who come to visit upon occasion.

"We should go," says T'Elle, and Nyota is about to nod when something buzzes in her ear. "I have something -" she says.

T'Elle shakes her head. "It is not from here. It is a dispatch from out of system -"

"Bajor," says Nyota.

"You cannot know if it is them," says T'Elle.

But Nyota holds up a finger and listens to the static. Then she quickly begins pushing some buttons on a panel on a gray box in front of her to activate the cypher.

_Operation Exterminator has failed. The Roach has still not been apprehended. Requesting more troops._

Nyota closes her eyes. It's not the news they've been waiting for, but it's welcome news nonetheless.

T'Elle is right. The Roach and his small army may not be Jim and the Enterprise crew, but Nyota has to hope. As if reading her thought's, T'Elle says, "The Roach is, by all accounts, Bajoran."

Nyota scowls, "And we're Romulan."

T'Elle just gazes at her.

Nyota and T'Elle are part of a plan to nip the war in the bud. But it wouldn't be possible to do what they're doing without the help of The Roach and people like him on a dozen different worlds where uprisings are taking place. By uniting Bajor and its small, persecuted Cardassian minority, The Roach alone has cost the Romulan Empire billions in credits and tens of thousands in troops, as well as bandwidth in intelligence.

Her ear buzzes again and she adjusts the cypher.

_Negative. The Roach's spouse has also not been apprehended._

Nyota smiles grimly. The Roach, according to Romulan intelligence, is married, or at least involved with a prominent member of the Bajoran resistance. It's the only evidence that makes Nyota think he might not be Jim.

"We should go," T'Elle says. "If the operation has failed, it is best that we go about our daily business as usual. We need to carefully guard against suspicions."

If the operation has failed...well, Nyota is pretty sure that she and T'Elle are as good as dead and the Federation is lost. But she nods and they begin packing up the equipment. T'Elle raises a trap door in the floor. As she does, Nyota taps one last button and then quickly stows the equipment into the small hidden space. T'Elle shuts the door, there is a shimmer, and the nearly unnoticeable joints in the paneling of the floor disappear completely.

Standing, Nyota exits the sanitary cubicle and goes to the dressing table in the small bedroom they share. She is still shocked after two years by her appearance in the mirror. When preparing her disguise, the surgeons determined what she would look like as she aged naturally. It was decided that she was still too striking; a spy is never striking, and neither too beautiful, nor too ugly. They've altered her face to be slightly less symmetrical, her eyes are narrower, her lips much thinner, her nose a little wider, all these with the gray hair, bags under her eyes, and lines around her mouth - she isn't recognizable to herself. She also draws not the slightest bit of suspicion.

Reaching down with hands artificially aged, Nyota takes two earrings out of a box, the only adornment she allows herself - because they aren't merely earrings, they're cleverly disguised communicators aligned with Federation frequencies. They also are an exact replica of a pair of earrings Spock gave her when she was at the Academy. They were sent after her original communicators broke.

He's found her here. It isn't surprising. He is a genius after all.

Picking up the earrings, she feels the slight chill she gets whenever she touches one of Spock's gifts. There is another. A belt that can generate a brief holographic image of empty air. It is Romulan in design but so was a belt she'd gotten at Starbase IV at a stopover while aboard the Enterprise - the holo belt is an exact replica.

She supposes it is his way of saying he is still out there and looking out for her.

"Your well being is important to me." She closes her eyes. Those were the words he'd said in her first horrible subspace call to him from the hospital in San Francisco, before they'd shipped her off to Tilonias III to begin code-breaking and training for her current mission.

x x x x

She was in the hospital bed in San Francisco recovering from TH319. Her mouth felt dry, like it was filled with cotton. She was hungry and afraid to eat. She was light-headed and exhausted but unable to sleep. The light on the hospital comm blinked. She saw Spock's name, and maybe it was a self-destructive instinct but she answered. The first words out of her mouth were,

"Why?"

"Your well being is important to me," he said, body rigid, eyes black.

Because he thought she was asking why he was calling, but of course she meant, why did you betray me, why did you lie, why did you pretend to care for me in the first place? And why did I believe you, why did I love you, why don't you love me? But she didn't say those words. Instead she laughed. Hearing a hysterical edge creep into her voice, she said, "Well, you're doing a bang up job of it. You could have killed me."

There was silence and then Spock said, "Obviously, that was not my intention."

"You know, Spock, it's not so obvious to me," Nyota said, picking at her sheet.

And then in a very slow, patient voice, as though speaking with a child, he said, "Nyota, Vulcans do not contract TH319. Nowhere in the literature is there any indication that we are capable of being carriers."

A nurse walked by Nyota's bed.

"Well, congratulations, Spock. You've made the medical journals."

"Nyota," Spock said, eyes following the nurse, "Perhaps we should have this conversation in private."

"Why, Spock? She's my nurse. She knows what I got and how I got it."

The nurse hurried from the room and Spock's eyes turned back to Nyota's.

"I don't understand," she said, a dam of sobs behind her words. "I don't understand."

She'd given so much. She thought she'd done everything right, put up with his sometimes seeming indifference, the many nights alone...all to escape the drama that was her mother's life. Yet here she was, living out a scene from a tawdry holo vid.

Spock stared blankly at the screen.

"You lied to me," she said. "You lied."

"Nyota," Spock said, "I have never lied to you."

"When you...touched Christine..." She pressed her lips together. It was only a touch. A sweep of Christine's temples. Perhaps if he had been human, forgivable. But he wasn't human, and although it wasn't a full mind meld, he used such touches to convey lust and attraction - to share his lust. "You said it was a mistake, that you didn't mean to drink the chocolate, and if you hadn't you never would have -"

"I did not mean to drink the chocolate," Spock said, chin dipping. "And what happened only happened due to its influence."

"You said it never happened before and that it would never happen again!" Nyota said, her voice between a scream and a strangled sob.

"It never happened before, and it never happened again."

And suddenly Nyota understood. "Not with Christine you mean."

"Not with Christine, and with no one else aboard the Enterprise," said Spock.

"You obeyed the letter, if not the spirit of the law," Nyota said.

He swallowed and she laughed. "Oh, Spock," she said with a smile that would have looked cruel

to anyone else. "What would Surak say?"

He took a short breath, dropping his eyes. "I failed you. You got ill. I apologize. It was never my intention -"

"You failed me because you cheated on me! Don't you understand that?"

Spock tilted his head. He blinked and looked away.

She laughed lowly. "All those times you were too busy to see me, said you were working late..." she shook her head. "You know, if you weren't Vulcan I might have wondered, I might have suspected, but I thought, Vulcans never do these things."

Not meeting her eyes, he said, "I am half human. And you are human."

"Good humans don't do this, Spock! Do you think your mother cheated on your father?"

Still not meeting her eyes he said, "No, she was female - and in any event they were bonded."

She was shocked by "she was female," and the weight of the stereotype contained therein. But the word that really hung in the air was bonded. Once she wanted to be bonded to Spock, convinced she would feel the love she was sure existed there. She'd excused him for not wanting the same, believing it was because he was still recovering from the trauma of losing his homeworld and his mother. But in the hospital bed, his gaze studiously not meeting hers, the thought of being physically touched by him, let alone mentally touched by him, made her feel weak, exposed and nauseous all at once.

She took a breath, not believing she had to explain this. "She didn't cheat on him because she loved him, she respected him, and because that's not the sort of human she was!"

Spock blinked, looked up at her a moment, and then away. "I am sorry. I thought...it was how things were done..."

She took a deep breath. "That's how you _wanted _things to be done," she spat.

Still not meeting her eyes he said, "It is obvious my logic was flawed. Any risk of you being harmed, physically, or emotionally, no matter how small was too large..."

She could only stare at the screen in disbelief.

"There is no one I have ever met who is as compatible with me as you, Nyota," Spock said. "I do hold you in high regard."

She tilted her head, felt her mouth twist as another sob threatened to escape. "Goodbye, Spock," she said.

She meant for it to be forever. It was not.

Spock called every day, and she couldn't seem to help herself; bored and lonely in her hospital bed she answered. Each call brought her near to tears and left her emotionally drained. And she still did not understand, him or herself. She'd tried doing everything right, finding the stable man, the dependable man, and she'd failed so utterly.

At Tilonias III it was better. The cryptanalysis team was small and led by one of Nyota's personal heroes - Dr. Iris Aronson of Oxford University. The woman was brilliant - and separated from her children. Granted they were grown, but Nyota doubted Iris noticed. She seemed to take out her separation anxiety on her small staff of 13 by mothering them all.

Comments like "Nyota, this algorithm isn't producing the desired results, we'll have to start over," were followed by, "You look so lovely this morning, but I do believe you need to eat more. Why don't we go get some tea and biscuits?"

They were like a family; well, what Nyota always imagined a family to be like. And they all shared her love of language, and all the sciences related to it. She never missed Spock during the day. But at night when she was alone...

Spock kept calling. Nyota didn't want to answer, not trusting herself to keep her calm even with monitors listening in. She'd faced death and destruction with steely calm, but facing Spock reduced her to the quivering female she always hated and swore she'd never be.

And then one morning, Iris said, "That nice young captain called, Nyota. You are allowed to call him back, you know. He said it was official business but -" The older woman winked at her.

"Nice?" Nyota laughed, but not cruelly. "You don't know him that well. That nice young captain is a playboy extraordinaire."

Iris shrugged. "So many of them are, dear. Why my Schlomo before he met me..." She tsk-tsked. "Better to let them get it out of their systems."

That night, when Nyota was struggling with her urge to call Spock she called Jim instead.

Talking to Jim became her coping mechanism.

He wasn't Spock. She couldn't talk about linguistics or subspace physics in the details she might like. If she tried after a while he would say things like, "I think my eyes are glazing over. Not sure if I can still blink."

She got in the habit of condensing the non-classified things she had read or done into short snippets, trying to make them entertaining for a layman. Sometimes she even made him laugh.

But she had her colleagues to talk about those things with anyways. They talked more about movies they'd seen, or wanted to see, and griped about shortages and censoring. They didn't really talk about the combat he was seeing; he shrugged off her questions. The closest he came was asking her to teach him every Romulan swear she knew, because, "When we run

into them it's not like I'm going to be friends with them anyways."

And then she got word of her assignment to Romulus. She couldn't talk to him about it and wished she could; she was very afraid. She wanted to know how he handled his fear, how he faced everyday knowing his chance of survival was only one in three. The closest answer she got was, cockroach powers.

And then she was being shuttled off to get her appearance modified and she couldn't talk to Jim anymore. By the time she was sent to Romulus, word was that the Enterprise was down.

x x x x

"We must go," T'Elle says.

Nearly dropping the earring in her hand, Nyota says, "Yes, yes, we must."

Nyota finishes dressing and with T'Elle steps out of the building their flat occupied and onto the crowded streets of Rumuli, an industrial city in the planet's Northern Hemisphere.

Nyota and T'Elle wear clothing that is much heavier than most of the Romulans here, but because of their dark skin it does not raise suspicion. They are obviously from the equatorial region, and are therefore cold. Intertwined within the fabric of their clothes are holo field generators that will make any body scanning sensors detect them as Romulans.

T'Elle walks behind Nyota. Because her facial reactions to being shoved or hassled on the crowded street are just slightly off, and the cadence of her speech is too flat, Nyota does most of the talking. Most Romulans assume that Nyota's "daughter" is mentally handicapped, and neither Nyota or T'Elle do anything to correct them.

Nyota once asked T'Elle if she was ever bothered by being presumed mentally inferior.

"That my emotional reactions are too muted to be that of a Romulan only disturbs me in that it may prove a detriment to the mission," T'Elle replied.

It was a logical response. Nyota should have expected it. But sometimes logic was shocking.

They were essentially stranded together in their little flat. They were both often bored and lonely. They talked, a lot. The subject of marriage and bondings came up, and Nyota couldn't help but tell the story of Spock's infidelity.

"It bothered you?" said T'Elle.

Nyota blinked at her. "Of course. Wouldn't it bother you?"

"But I am Vulcan," said T'Elle. "Having more than one sexual partner is simply not done among our kind. One who did so would be banished. But among humans it is common. I always presumed humans simply did not care."

Now as Nyota navigates her way down Rumuli's crowded streets, she is still trying to wrap her head around that answer - or rather her heart. It cannot excuse what Spock did. But it adds a different perspective.

They come to a building with a metal sign displaying the name of the establishment in green light. There is a heavy, old fashioned door below it. T'Elle opens it and Nyota enters.

Inside is the Romulan equivalent of, for lack of a better word, a public house. It is sort of a pub, tea house, coffee shop, with holos playing, and children underfoot.

Nyota has sometimes thought, that every culture, no matter how despicable, has some redeeming virtues. Public houses are a virtue of the Romulans. No one is to young to come by, no one too old, and Romulans from across the planet as well as locals fill the stalls and tables.

They're from all walks of life, with the glaring absence of the military personell - well, Nyota's sure the secret police are here. But otherwise, soldiers have their own haunts, and leave humble places like this alone.

Nyota and T'Elle go to their normal table, close to the center of the room. They've been monitoring and reporting on the mood of the Romulan populace since they've arrived. And it has been changing - or perhaps the secret police are stretched thin now and ordinary people have felt more comfortable complaining. On Earth there may be arm-chair quarterbacking, but on Romulus there is arm-chair generaling, and ordinary Romulans aren't convinced that the Empire hasn't taken on more than they can chew.

As Nyota sits down she hears someone say, "Well if this red matter is so great, why haven't they used it again?"

She knows the answer of course. There is hardly any red matter left.

"And why aren't our ships being outfitted more quickly with the latest weaponry?" says another.

"Because they're running out of money," someone replies.

And it's true, Nyota knows.

"What will you have? The usual Grandmother?" says Bitnan, the gruff waiter.

Nyota nods.

He throws a towel over his shoulder and says, "I'm warning you, it's mostly tubers now. Meat 'n vegetables being rationed."

"It's alright," says Nyota.

"Long live the Empire," he says, but rolls his eyes as he walks away.

Nyota keeps a straight face.

A ball bumps against T'Elle's feet and the Vulcan retrieves it. She tosses it gently to a young child who is suddenly at their table, his parents laughing in the distance.

"Hello Yanen," says Nyota smiling and ruffling the boys hair. She and T'Elle are both fond of the little Romulan - apparently an aversion to children is a Spock trait, not a Vulcan one.

"Hello Grandmother, hello Aunt," says Yanen with a grin.

Nyota's about to ask him what mischief he is into when she feels T'Elle's hand on her shoulder. A buzz of concern jolts even through the fabric of Nyota's robe - her Vulcan friend is nervous. Suddenly aware of the silence in the crowd she looks up, and sees all the holos in the room have switched to a Romulan she knows from propaganda holos and pictures. It is the Romulan Emperor, and unlike the other holos she has seen this is live. He is flanked by Admiral Barret and the head of SI. Eyes widening, she gasps. Fortunately her reaction is not out place, around her murmurs go up from the crowd.

"My brave and loyal people," the Emperor begins. "The war is over, the military is to begin evacuating all recently colonized worlds immediately. I order you to remain calm..."

**A/N:**

Some people said that they can't imagine Spock lying to Nyota. I can't either, but I don't think he had too.

The next two (?) chapters of 5 Times are just so happy - I guess there was a little angst left in my system though, I decided to post this. I actually wrote it to go into 5 Times, but decided against it.

For happier Spock Uhura check out Notes From the Classroom's "Crossing the Equator" in my faves!

If you read this, and enjoyed it, please leave a review!


End file.
